Today, President Obama signed orders closing Gitmo and other extrajudicial CIA prisons.

And if that wasn’t enough, his directives regarding disclosure and transparency are worrying convervatives who think they might enable investigations of Bush-era crimes. Make no mistake; their worry is about disclosure, not about crimes, which is so wrong I’m sort of dizzy just considering it. Incidentally, this shift in policy — to lean towards disclosure, not secrecy — is essentially a return to Clinton-era rules:

[The Bush administration’s 2001 FOIA] directive encouraged federal agencies to reject requests for documents if there was any legal basis to do so, promising that the Justice Department would defend them in court. It was a stark reversal of the policy set eight years earlier, when the Clinton administration told agencies to make records available whenever they could, even if the law provided a reason not to, so long as there was no ”foreseeable harm” from the release.